Busted, Part 2

Those MRI tubes are remarkably like The Fifth Element. The white tunnel (my cousin the doctor calls it The Tube of Truth), all the buzzing, whirring, clicking and clinical feel of it. It’s not spacious I’ll grant you that and it creates quite the sensory confusion with the cold air blowing over the top of you while the underneath of you heats up.

I realised that the last post was way too bigger jump from this post for those of you not following the story on instagram, Facebook, Twitter or any other channel I could find to absorb my need to over-share.

Monday morning I woke up in ridiculous pain, still and was basically scared out of my pants. It was a whole new pain. A totally different pain. The sciatica was gone! The sciatica I had been enduring for more than three months, that had been increasingly incapacitating me, making me snap at my children as the pain absorbed my whole being. Gone! It was a miracle!

Of course, in its place was the fact I couldn’t feel my left leg and both my legs felt they couldn’t bear my weight. I mean, who could blame them.

I expressed my fear on Facebook – as you do – and my Personal Physician Thoracic Specialist Also Happens To Be Chef’s Cousin, let’s call him Steve – told me to go to “a good hospital” as in Royal North Shore Emergency. Which we did. Unfortunately that plan came a bit unstuck with handsome but clearly stupid ER doctor. He told me I wasn’t bad enough to go for an MRI and that if he DID send me the head of radiography would “chew his head off” about wasting his time. Instead he called in a rheumatologist. Because clearly, somewhere along the path of excruciating back pain I developed a nasty case of arthritis.

The rheumatologist referred me to a clinic the following Tuesday, so in just over a week’s time and organised an “emergency” MRI for that Wednesday. In the meantime it was paracetamol, ibuprofen and endone for “breakthrough” pain.

I have no real recollection of time from that Monday morning at ER to the MRI on Wednesday afternoon.

Not right

On seeing the scan Thursday, or maybe Wednesday night, Steve called bullshit, the rheumatology referral – “they might as well have booked you in for a haircut” I believe was the phrase, got the report from the imaging and wrote me the most kick-arse referral I’ve ever read.